How did a hate group that ran an entire country  seemingly disappear into thin air? Spoiler alert -  

they didn’t. While World War II has fascinated  historians and the public alike since 1945,  

what happened to the perpetrators of  one of the greatest evils of all time  

is less often discussed. Today on Nutty History,  

we’re examining the hard truth about what  happened to the Nazis after World War II.  

After the allied victory in World War II,  Germany was divided into zones of occupation  

between the U.S, Britain, France and the Soviet  Union. The allies adopted various policies  

under the general plan of “de-nazification.”  De-nazification was a plan implemented to rid  

German and Austrian society from Nazi power and  influence. Life for detained Nazis was not equal  

depending on the zone they lived in. The Soviet  internment camps had the poorest conditions.  

This prompted many to attempt to  relocate to one of the Western zones  

under the guise of anti-communist  sentiments. Of the Western zones,  

French occupied Germany was the most lenient area.  In their view, Germany as a whole was responsible  

for the war, and they put less importance  on classifying between Nazis and non-Nazis.  

In the five years following the war, about  400,000 Germans were detained in internment  

camps while awaiting possible penalties. This  sounds like a lot at first, but when you consider  

that up to 45 million Germans at the time were  either members or supporters of the Nazi party,  

something doesn’t add up. The problem with  de-nazification was one of sheer magnitude.  

There were simply too many Germans involved to  process who had done what. Imagine an entire  

country in line at the DMV – that’s the kind of  bureaucratic sluggishness we’re talking about.  

Another issue was rebuilding Germany’s  economy. According to de-nazification rules,  

offenders were to be removed from higher ranking  jobs and forced to do manual labor. But if every  

Nazi and Nazi sympathizer was held responsible,  there literally wouldn’t be enough skilled workers  

for a functioning society. In the British zone,  for instance, it was found that 90% of lawyers  

were Nazis. Since they couldn’t very well have  a functioning society without any law or order,  

Britain determined that 50% of the German Legal  Civil Services could be staffed by “nominal”  

Nazis. Nazi but not Nazi Nazis. The French zone  encountered a similar problem with teachers.  

After firing three quarters of teachers due to  Nazi influence, they had to rehire them in order  

to have an education system. Reconstructing a  country while simultaneously trying to categorize  

and penalize a large number of culpable  citizens was far from a simple process.  

When de-nazification began, Eisenhower, an Army  general at the time, estimated the process would  

take 50 years. But by 1946, the allied powers  had handed over the reins on de-nazification  

to Germany. Wait what? Yep, Germany was now  in charge of enforcing their own punishment.  

A popular destination for the worst  of the worst Nazis, South America  

contained many sympathetic dictators at  the time who opened their proverbial doors.  

Up to 9,000 Nazi officials and collaborators  are thought to have escaped to South America  

after the war. While Brazil and Chile had their  fair share of exiles, Argentina by far had the  

most. Juan Perón, the Argentine president,  was a pretty big fan of fascism himself,  

especially after serving as a military attaché in  Italy early on in World War II. He also sought to  

grow his own country’s power by recruiting those  with particular military and technical expertise.  

Perón and his government officials worked to  create “rat lines” for Nazi escape through  

ports in Italy and Spain. He also aided in  forging documents for leaving the country.  

Most of the Nazis made their way down the  Pacific using falsified Red Cross passports  

stamped with Argentine tourist visas. Once they  were in Argentina, most Nazis changed their name  

for a time to go into hiding. But some resumed  living under their real names as it became clear  

that Argentina wouldn’t extradite them back to  Germany, even if their identity was discovered.  

Of course, Argentina wasn’t the only country to  poach Nazis for their own gain. As an arms race  

began between the United States and the Soviet  Union, collecting expert scientists and engineers  

became a higher priority to the respective  governments than punishing crimes against  

humanity. In 1945, the U.S. had secretly enacted  the program “Operation Paperclip” to take German  

scientists and engineers back to the mainland,  many of them Nazis, essentially as human weapons.  

Near the end of the war, Germany had realized  the need for these skills, and German scientist  

Wener Osenberg created a list identifying names. A  Polish lab tech ended up finding the list torn up  

in a toilet, which eventually made its way from  MI6 to U.S. intelligence. In addition to wanting  

these people for their own side, another  crucial motivation of Operation Paperclip  

was preventing the Soviets from gaining  their technical expertise. While called  

“an evacuation operation,” identified targets  were essentially kidnapped and forced to the  

U.S. where they were held for months at a time  for interrogation. Still, many of these literal  

rocket scientists went on to have incredibly  successful careers in the U.S. and were part of  

the NASA Space program, despite a suspected  high level of Nazi involvement among them.  

For the most serious offenders that  hadn’t managed to escape into hiding,  

the Nuremberg trials prosecuted Nazis in  1946 for war crimes, crimes against humanity,  

and wars of aggression. These trials were  important for determining international law,  

specifically when it came to prosecuting  war crimes. They were also a crucial step  

in holding some of the most prominent  criminals responsible for the Holocaust.  

The first and most well-known trial indicted 24  men, with outcomes ranging from acquittal to ten  

years imprisonment to execution. 12 were sentenced  to death. While the trials represented justice for  

some, twelve men receiving capital punishment  pales in comparison to the millions that died  

in the Holocaust, and the large number of  perpetrators that were never held responsible for  

their actions. Some have criticized the legality  of the Nuremberg trials, calling them an example  

of “victor’s justice” and judicially invalid.  Other criticisms have pointed to a hypocrisy  

of allied nations prosecuting crimes against  humanity after their own various wartime actions.  

After the allied powers gave up their  de-nazification efforts after only a few months,  

Germany was tasked with the challenge, though  they were still occupied by ally countries.  

Unsurprisingly, Germany adopted a looser set of  rules when it came to identifying and punishing  

Nazis. Anyone born after 1919 was considered  “brain-washed” and exempt from punishment.  

Of the public officials that the  U.S. had removed from office,  

75% were reinstated. And to avoid getting bogged  down by the lengthy and pesky business of trials,  

90% of Nazis were classified as lesser offenders.  By 1948, the Cold War had become a greater concern  

for the U.S., and any remaining cases were  sped through with proceedings that were legally  

sketchy, at best. By 1951, de-nazification ended  and emphasis shifted toward paying reparations  

to victims and their families. From pardons and  amnesties enacted by the German government, nearly  

800,000 people were freed from any punishment or  penalty. So, was Germany finally “denazified?”  

At the German Ministry of Justice at the time,  77% of senior officials were former Nazis.  

Post-war, some of the most notorious Nazis managed  to go into hiding and later escape Germany.  

While some lived entire lives getting away with  mass murder, other big names were captured by  

Nazi Hunters, who popped up to deliver justice  to war criminals who were living anonymously.  

Adolph Eichmann, the mastermind behind Hitler's  “Final Solution” and network of concentration  

camps, fled to Buenos Aires where he worked in a  Mercedes-Benz automotive plant and lived with his  

wife and four children. It wasn’t until 1960 that  Eichmann was captured by Israeli agents, drugging  

him and flying him out of Argentina disguised  as an Israeli airline worker who’d suffered a  

head trauma. Despite protests for his return from  Argentina, Eichmann was later tried and executed  

in Israel. Not all Nazi hunters were government  operatives, however. Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust  

survivor turned Nazi hunter, tracked down Franz  Stangl in São Paulo. Stangl was responsible for  

the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program that killed  those with mental and physical disabilities. After  

Wisenthal discovered him, Stangl was extradited to  West Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment.  

As late as 2019 in the United States, Jakiw Palij  was deported from the country at 95-years-old.  

A historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum  discovered that Palij had served as a guard  

at a forced labor camp during the war, rather  than working on his father’s farm as he claimed  

in 1949. It’s an unfortunate truth that not all  Nazis were held accountable for their crimes.  

Nazi hunting has since died down as most people  alive during World War II have since passed away.  

That’s all for this episode of Nutty History. If  you learned something new, please like this video  

and let us know in the comments what historical  time or event you’d like us to cover next time.